LIDA: Health Community
Context
As part of our Health Community’s ambition to bring together researchers from a range of backgrounds and academic disciplines alongside external non-HE partners – this year we focussed on bringing together key opinion leaders from the public sector, industry and research in events focussed on the launch of CPRD@Leeds improving University of Leeds access to the richest source of primary care data in England, cutting edge Cancer Data Research through our Cancer Data Day and building trust in secure data research environments in our public debate on the use of SDEs for patient data.
Above images - Delegates attending our Cancer Data Day in July 2025.
Our community continues to drive forward opportunities for advancing state-of-the-art data science to tackle global health challenges through our strategic stakeholder events and are pleased to celebrate our wide-ranging research portfolio in this years’ showcase.
Community Lead Changes
The LIDA Health Community is led by Dr Marlous Hall co-led alongside Professor David Westhead and Dr Samuel Relton. We would like to extend a warm welcome to Dr Amy Downing joining as Health Community co-lead for this coming academic year. We would like to thank Professor David Westhead for establishing the community and his leadership over the past three years and to Professor Andy Clegg for his involvement from the community’s inception. LIDA Health also has an active early career research community – led by Dr Michal Zulcinski and Dr Zak Thornton and recently joined by Volodymyr (Vlad) Chapman. We would like to express our sincere thanks to Tamara del Toro and Zoe Hancox for their efforts in establishing a thriving LIDA Health ECR community over the past year and are looking forward to watching this community go from strength to strength.
Achievements
For this years’ annual showcase we are happy to celebrate some of the key highlights from the LIDA Health Community.
Our event highlights include the launch of the CPRD data multi-study licence (CPRD@Leeds) supported by the Leeds Institute for Health Sciences which opens up ease of access to CPRD primary care data for University colleagues, our Cancer Data Day and a lively public debate on SDEs with an impressive set of external attendees and speakers across all events including colleagues from across University of Leeds faculties, the University of York, Our Future Health, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Leeds Cancer Research Centre, Roche, AstraZeneca, GSK, NHS Yorkshire and Humber SDE, West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board, Ethox, Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, Use MY data and patient representatives.
Well done to all teams involved in running and organising of these community events in particular Dr Sam Relton and Professor Andrew Clegg, Dr Amy Downing and Professor David Westhead and Roz Ryan-Mills.
Meanwhile the ECR community led a number of very well attended sessions including a ‘Grants Made Simple’ series of events tied to a unique ECR grant writing competition, patient and public involvement in research, narrative CVs and a hugely successful ECR Career Showcase event attended by external health data science employers and many of the Health ECR community.
People News
We are pleased to welcome Professor Jon Dorling, an Academic Consultant Neonatologist, to LIDA as the newly appointed Clinical Chair of CHORAL from relocation from Southampton.
Our community’s international profile is growing rapidly – and we are currently hosting Ms Aitana Vazquez Fernandez, visiting PhD research fellow from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (hosted by Dr Marlous Hall for 6-month funded placement). We are looking forward to welcoming Professor Christy Avery (Professor of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina) who has been awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Senior Scientist Award to join Dr Mark Iles and Professor Ann Morgan from February 2026 for six months (https://fulbright.org.uk/people-search/christy-avery/).
Dr Ramesh Nadarajah presenting at ESoC
Dr Ramesh Nadarajah presented a late breaking abstract at the European Society of Cardiology in Madrid with findings from the FIND-AF clinical trial of machine learning–guided screening.
Dr Jonathan Batty completed his Wellcome 4Ward North PhD in July without corrections - a real testament to his excellent standard of work. Jonny presented his large-language driven model-based Inclusive Multimorbidity Phenotyping Algorithm and Clinical Coding Tool (IMPACT) at the Health Data Research UK conference this October with peer-review publication to follow.
DR Jonathon Batty presenting at HDR UK
There was strong LIDA Health representation contributing to the AI for Medical Diagnosis and Care CDT including for recently completed Dr Anna-Grace Linton’s PhD on Automated Analysis of Textual Comments in PROMS.
We have also supported impressive widening participation opportunities by Dr Michal Zulcinski hosting an external first year undergraduate and three A-level students as part of the in2STEM programme.
Key papers and funding
Key papers from the community cover the breadth of health data science including the following notable highlights:
- Research of the excised signal circle (ESC), a circular piece of DNA, shown to replicate and persist in cells and its association with molecular processes that promote relapse in some forms of childhood leukaemia published in Nature;
- A nationwide critical care study identifying key health inequalities in paediatric critical care outcomes (2008-2021);
- Prediction of cranial ischaemic complications in patients with giant cell arteritis by age, anticoagulants, hypertension and cardiovascular genetic traits, and
- A review and meta-analyses of multimorbidity in acute coronary syndrome.
There have been a number of large grants to celebrate with particular highlights including;
- Dr Lesley Smith, recently promoted to Associate Professor of Health Data Science, and her Blood Cancer UK grant BLISS - Blood cancer clinical trials Long-term follow-up using Integrated healthcare SystemS data” £900K, May 2025 - April 2030 with Professor David Cairns as joint PI
- Dr Marlous Hall’s Wellcome Career Development Award (£2M, commence March 2026) focussed on target trial emulation for patients with multimorbidity and myocardial infarction.
We are also proud to celebrate our close working partnership with the West Yorkshire ICB as a result of systems engineering development funding from the NIHR led by Professor Alison McKay and Professor Philip Conaghan. We have since supported two DSDP projects as a result of this partnership using powerful commission data from the Leeds Data Model for the first time to aid health commissioner understanding the health system trajectories of individuals with mental health conditions and the impact of arthritis on health service utilisation for patients with multimorbidity. View all DSDP projects
Finally – our PROMOTE project is making excellent headway in our ambition to map out and understand barriers to career progression for biomedical data scientists across academy and industry.
Many thanks to all of you who continue to contribute to the community from across the University – whether through the research conducted, leading and organising events or attending and being an active part of our strategic workshops and meetings – we appreciate it all and are genuinely excited to see what new health data science impact we can deliver in the year ahead.